As the final waves of Gen Z — the youngest of whom are currently around 14 — make their way through high school and into colleges and trade schools, some higher education instructors are noticing a severe lack of reading comprehension skills in their students. Schools, in turn, are finding the only path forward is to drastically lower their expectations, for better or worse.

As Pepperdine University literature professor Jessica Hooten Wilson told Fortune in a recent interview, “it’s not even an inability to critically think. It’s an inability to read sentences.”

Wilson is one of the professors who’s had to quietly lower her academic benchmarks thanks to the rise in barely literate Gen Zers graduating American high schools.